


Joyeux Noël

by Carrogath



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Christmas, F/F, Implied/Referenced Abuse, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, Pre-Relationship, Suicidal Thoughts, Time Travel, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-24
Updated: 2016-12-24
Packaged: 2018-09-11 12:16:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,572
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8979301
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Carrogath/pseuds/Carrogath
Summary: Widowmaker visits Gérard’s grave every year on Christmas, and this year, her favorite nuisance makes a surprise appearance.
Fortunately, she just happens to have a gun on her.





	1. Joyeux Noël

**Author's Note:**

> Read the afterword (the second chapter) for additional notes on Tracer's time traveling abilities as described in this story.
> 
> Happy holidays!

“Te souviens-tu de moi, Gérard?”

Every Christmas, it was like clockwork. She would buy a plane ticket to Paris, take a taxi from the airport to a little graveyard in the suburbs, and talk to his headstone. She would stay there for hours, babbling on like a madwoman about the past, even as the memories drew further away from her in time, worn and faded from years of disuse. Sometimes there would be others. She recognized a few people from time to time—an old man with a cane and a Swiss accent, a family of four mourning their father—and newcomers like to gawk at the color of her skin, for which she would have been happy to draw the handgun from out underneath her coat and drive the butt of the weapon repeatedly into their heads until they begged for forgiveness.

She spoke little when she was not alone. Nonetheless, she would stay there until sunset, and longer into the night, until it was time for her to leave. She must have appeared as a specter to them, a ghostly apparition that appeared only on Christmas to mourn one Gérard Lacroix.

Last year, the old man with the cane made the poor decision of trying to speak with her.

“I always see you here,” he said to her in French. He had a wrinkled, leathery face, crow’s feet from years of too much smiling, and a threadbare flat cap that he must have owned for decades. He dressed lightly for the weather, in a jacket and brown corduroy pants, but then, she didn’t have to wear a coat at all. A crisp white collar peeked out from underneath the zipper of his jacket. There was a certain senility in his openness, a sort of feeble helplessness.

The man’s name was Pierre Montagne. Every year he came to visit his wife, Lucille Montagne, a parisienne who liked to paint watercolors in her spare time. They met at their university while he was studying architecture in Paris, fell in love and got married a few months later. He helped design new buildings for the arrondissements after the first Omnic Crisis, and supported her artistic efforts in spite of her lack of success. Later they moved to Geneva to avoid the protests, and she died about ten years later from lung cancer that ran in the family. He’d apparently lived a very happy life, and Amélie wanted nothing to do with him.

“So how do you know this Gérard Lacroix?” He looked ancient, but his voice was still strong, and he was tall. He had a slight stoop, but he still managed to have several centimeters on her.

“He was my husband, and I killed him,” she imagined herself saying. Instead, she studied him with her yellow hawk’s eyes, scrutinizing the facial expressions which appeared to her more alien every day. She said, “He is someone very important to me.”

“I can see that,” said the smiling man. “Care to share?”

She looked away from him. “Not really.”

“You look young. It seems a shame.”

She couldn’t keep her voice from trembling, and turned bodily away from him. “You couldn’t even begin to understand.”

“Perhaps not.” He shuffled away from her, as if to give her space. She felt a sting of condescension. “I thought you seemed lonely, that’s all.”

She barked a laugh. “I did not come to a graveyard for a chat.”

“You didn’t come here to be alone.”

She glared at him. The man was staring at the ground.

“I did not come here for you,” she hissed.

“You came here for Gérard. I understand.”

“And yet you don’t seem to respect that.”

He turned up to face her. The smile was gone. “What is your name, if I might ask?”

“Amélie,” she said, in scorn. “And before you ask who I am and what I do, I regret to inform you that if I told you, then I would have to kill you afterward.”

He smiled a bit, again. Evidently, he didn’t seem to believe her, or he did and had resigned himself to the fact that she was a killer. Whichever it was, neither mattered to her.

“Amélie, is it?” he said. “It’s a beautiful name.”

“Yes,” she drawled. “It is.”

“Well, Amélie, I’m sure you made Gérard very happy by coming to visit him today.”

She chuckled. “I wouldn’t be so sure of that.”

“Oh?” He gave her an inquisitive look.

“We had a… troubled relationship.” That was putting it mildly, even if it was the truth. “But I feel as though my life makes a little more sense whenever I come here.”

“How so?”

“The world seems much less colorful without him. Every day I mourn his loss, but when I come here, it doesn’t seem so… awful.” Amélie bit down on her lip. She hadn’t expected to say so much.

“It’s quiet here on Christmas, isn’t it?” The man smiled. “Everyone is at home.”

“Except for you and I, apparently.”

“Indeed. I spend Christmas Eve with my family,” the man blathered on, “and then on Christmas morning I come here to visit my wife.”

“Mm.” The skies were overcast, the trees bare, the grass dead and cold. Amélie shifted, and the grass crunched underfoot.

“As for you—well, I don’t know what your life is like—but you make the effort to come here every year. It’s certainly not an ordinary day, at least for us.”

“It’s hardly happy,” she said with a scowl.

“But clearly this man brought you happiness.”

“Once.”

She turned and took a few steps further away from him. She’d rationalized his murder to herself a thousand times, in a thousand different ways. He wasn’t at home often enough; he wasn’t loving enough; he wouldn’t know what to do if she told him she was being stalked and threatened by Talon. He was a poor excuse for a husband; he was bad at his job; he couldn’t even save his fucking wife from being kidnapped. He deserved to be killed in his sleep by the very hands that caressed him at night, that had once loved him, every part of him. He had been a good lover. She wouldn’t have married him otherwise. But he had failed her.

Now, she was made of spite.

She looked at his gravestone, the name and the dates mocking his memory. As if anyone could be reduced to a name and two numbers. As the years wore on, she was losing him, and she was losing what it meant to be herself, to be Amélie. Buried under the headstone, along with that godforsaken corpse, were the last few dregs of her humanity.

She didn’t entertain the thought of what might have happened had she not gone through with it. Once, she would have gladly begged for death at the hands of Talon. Not anymore. Still, she loathed her survival instinct, and thought about killing herself often. She could take the pistol in her pocket, put it to her head, and pull the trigger. Her mind, finally freed from its restraints, would blossom red along the ground. She pictured a beautiful, perfectly orchestrated suicide, so magnificent it brought tears to her eyes. Truly, a death worthy of a master of the art. Talon had spent all this time perfecting their pet sniper, and she could destroy their handiwork in the blink of an eye.

She wanted to, and sometimes she would sit there and cut and cut until the urges went away, watch the blood burble lazily from the wounds in her skin. Drugs to close her mind and raise her heart rate. Cigarettes and alcohol. A cold, meticulously crafted mask of absolute obedience, the act of brainwashing herself. And the _conditioning_ , oh, whenever she stepped out of line, the part of herself she shut away and locked up tight, a chest sunk at the bottom of the ocean. There were blank spots in her memory, but she didn’t need to remember them to know what had happened. She was a cog in the machine, a tool, a means to Talon’s ends. Calling her a “hitman” would be generous. She was much closer to a slave.

“Monsieur Montagne,” she finally said, without looking.

Nothing.

She turned her head, and saw that he was gone.

 

 

* * *

 

 

This year, there was no sign of Pierre at the graveyard. The family of four, the Heigels, had only stayed for about an hour before leaving. She wondered if he was dead, but she thought that if he were dead he should like to be buried next to his wife. He’d been old. Perhaps he was too sick to come this year. Perhaps he was not dead, but in the process of dying slowly, as was the tendency with old age.

Such was life. Everyone died, in the end.

This year was colder than the last. Her boots sank into the wet snow on the ground, and it weighed down the branches of trees, threatening to topple them over. It packed around the headstones, and had been shoveled in piles to the side. It was blinding white in the daylight, and worse against her sensitive eyes. There were more cars on the road this year too, and more traffic. She wanted to tell Gérard all about it. She would tell him about her hits and about her day, about the little things that bothered her on the plane, about Gabriel and that filthy hacker Sombra, rambling on and on until she had exhausted her breath. She had finally succumbed to lunacy; she didn’t care who listened anymore, Talon or Overwatch or Pierre; she would tell him all her secrets, the way she used to into the crook of his neck, the curve of his spine, her Gérard.

She was partway through a story about the assassination of the American ambassador to Russia when she felt the air surge and crackle behind her. A force, like a vacuum, sucked the air out from behind her, and then expanded outward as if to spit something out.

“Merde,” she hissed, and drew her gun and turned around.

Leather jacket, giant glowing white harness, tinted goggles and an unruly nest of brown hair. Her muzzle pointed between the eyes of a very familiar face.

She pulled the trigger. Tracer disappeared, and the air swirled around and spat her out to Widowmaker’s left. She aimed and shot again. Tracer dodged, this time to her right.

“Tellement prévisible,” she said, and then pointed to her left, where Tracer reappeared and tackled her to the ground. She shoved her knee into Tracer’s gut.

“O-oi, hold on a second,” Tracer pinned her leg down with one arm, straddled her and seized her wrist.

She bared her teeth. Her arm trembled in Tracer’s grasp. Why? Was it because she was here, because she was with Gérard? “What are you doing here?” she snarled.

“I-I don’t know! OK?” Tracer’s face twisted in frustration. “I don’t even know where I am right now.”

“Bullshit. You are in Paris. In the graveyard where my husband is buried.”

“What?” Her eyes widened.

Widowmaker planted her feet on the ground and then sprang up, using the momentum to throw her off. Then she pushed her down and drove the muzzle of her gun into her left temple. “I don’t know what you are doing here, but it is the perfect opportunity to kill you.”

“What year is it? What day is it?” Tracer tried to push her arm away, futilely; Widowmaker was stronger. “I swear, I’m not trying to hurt you!”

“Doesn’t matter.” She pulled the trigger again. Tracer blinked, slipping between her legs. She turned around and felt a hard kick against her wrist. She cried in pain and dropped the gun. Tracer grabbed it and pointed it at her face.

“Don’t move.” She glared at her.

Her heart was hammering. She swore under her breath. “What the fuck are you doing here, Tracer? It’s Christmas.”

Her jaw dropped. “What? Christmas?”

“Christmas,” Widowmaker repeated, “in the year 2076. Does that help, mademoiselle?”

“Well, then, you can’t kill anybody on Christmas, now can you?”

She eyed the gun in Tracer’s hand. “Never say never.”

“C’mon, it’s Christmas!” Tracer blinked back, three times, and flung the gun away into the snow. “Even you’ve got to have a heart on Christmas Day!” she shouted.

She’d seen where the gun had fallen into the snow, into one of the heaps around the graveyard, but it was too far away and her heart did not allow for much physical strain. She was reliant on a potent chemical cocktail to even function in the first place, and whenever she went on assignment she never worked alone. The woman had her beat.

Tracer’s chest heaved. “Now that that’s out of the way…” She brushed off her hands and took long strides toward her. “My accelerator malfunctioned. Did a spot of time traveling.” She put her hands on her hips and looked around. “Space-time traveling, even. I can tell you I’ve never been here before.”

Widowmaker stared down at the thing on her chest. It whirred and crackled with blue light. Something about the noises it was making disturbed her—it would whine, then slow down, then start up again, all the while throwing sparks left and right.

“It’s self-repairing, so I should be back to where I’m meant in a little while.” She paused and looked at her. “Christmas, huh?” She tapped her chin. “Christmas in 2076… Oh!” Her face brightened. “I know right about where I was today! Flew into Gibraltar, had dinner with me and the bird and Winston and Athena.”

“You’re from the future?” She didn’t look any older.

“Not by much. A few months out.” Tracer folded her arms. She seemed cold. “I ought to be grateful, this time. Sometimes I end up in places that aren’t quite so peaceful.”

“Leave,” Widowmaker spat.

Tracer glared at her. Her brow creased. “Don’t have to be like that.”

“I did not come here to talk to you,” she hissed. “I came here to be with my husband.” She pointed back at his grave. “And before you run off your mouth at me, I know exactly what I did to him.”

“I…” She turned away, hiding her expression. “Sorry to interrupt, I guess.”

“As you should be.” She slipped her hands into her pockets. “Now go.”

Tracer shook her head. “Still,” she said, perking up, “rare that we get a chance to talk like this.”

“I don’t want to talk to you, fool.”

“It’s Christmas. I doubt it was coincidence that brought me here.” Tracer grinned at her.

“Oh,” she groaned, “don’t even start.”

“You’re a lonely sort, usually. Thought you might like the company.” She walked up to Gérard’s grave and pinched her chin, inspecting it. “Quaint little area here.” Tracer looked back at her.

“What.” The venom was being drained from her voice. Tracer was already beginning to wear her out; she had no energy for this.

“You know…” Her thick eyebrows rose, and then fell. “They say you weren’t so bad, as Amélie. I don’t think we were ever introduced, so I can only imagine.”

“I was not a genetically modified assassin, if that’s what you mean,” she said through her teeth.

“Like to think you were nicer the way you were before—nicer than you are now, at least.”

“What are you trying to say, Tracer?”

She put her hands behind her head. “It’s Christmas,” she said, as if it were a magic word that would make all the world’s problems go away. She pivoted on her heels and kicked one foot up into the air, tossing about the snow. “Thought we might be able to call a truce, try to be friends for a day.”

“You’re kidding,” she said flatly.

“You ever heard of the Christmas truce?”

“Yes,” she said. “The Trêve de Noël. What of it?”

“People from all different sides, comin’ together. Ain’t that something? Maybe it only happened once, but that’s the sort of thing that…” Her expression softened, grew faraway. “Makes you think they didn’t really want to fight, that they were only followin’ orders.”

Her face twisted into a sneer. “Is that not what soldiers do?”

She frowned. “There’s a difference between following orders and following your conscience.”

“Naive words from a naive person.”

“I bet you got one yourself. A conscience, I mean.” Her brow scrunched. “You might be a bit too fond of… what you do to earn a living, and maybe you don’t feel guilt in the way most other people do—”

“No.”

“You could at least let me finish—”

“No,” she said again. “I’m not going to be lectured on morality by you.”

Tracer took a step toward her. “I’m not tellin’ you not to kill. Ideally no one should really have to. All I’m saying is that you’re capable of…” she waved her hands in frustration, “of empathy. Plain and simple. Jack wants to believe you’re an emotionless freak; I want to convince him otherwise. All right?”

“Why bother?” she asked.

“No reason. For my own bloody self-satisfaction.” Tracer sighed. “I don’t know. I tried to train myself into believing you were some sort of irredeemable psycho, but I just couldn’t do it. It just…” she held a hand up to her mouth, “didn’t feel right to me. Might sound condescending to you, but I think you’re really hurting on the inside.” She spun on her heels and folded her hands behind her back. “Not that it matters, since you’re just as stubborn as I am.” Tracer stared at her, and then tilted her head.

“What,” she said again. She was saying that word a lot today.

“Besides,” she said, with a lopsided smile, “you find them fun, don’t you? The firefights.” The smile widened. “Makes you feel alive, you said.”

 _Alive_. The word sounded even worse in her atrocious accent than she could have imagined.

“The little games of cat-and-mouse don’t get you all hot and bothered?”

Widowmaker stared at her, and the first thought that occurred to her was that she was correct. She was a woman who was in love with violence for violence’s sake, and anyone who chose to draw out a fight for the sake of pleasure would have understood at least that. She was almost impressed.

“They do,” she said, and blinked at her owlishly, and Tracer blinked back as if she hadn’t been expecting that response.

“Pardon?”

Widowmaker drew herself up to her full height, and, one foot in front of the other, stalked toward her like a lioness to her prey. To her satisfaction, Tracer drew back. She may have even looked a little nervous.

“Err…”

“I’m harmless, ma chérie,” she said with a wolfish grin. “Or don’t you believe me?”

“I…” She chuckled nervously. The whirrs of her accelerator sounded more regular now, and she didn’t see sparks flying out of the center anymore. That thing was fixing itself. “I sure would like to.”

“Would you?” Widowmaker held out a hand toward her face.

One hand settled on her cheek. Her skin was warm to the touch. Tracer didn’t move, but her eyes darted about wildly, looking for an escape.

“It’s a truce, after all,” she purred, and ran a hand down her face, to the soft skin below her jaw, and nudged her chin up. “Non?”

Tracer’s chest heaved under the chronal accelerator. Her nostrils flared.

“Ça alors!” She broke into a vicious grin. “You are afraid?”

She scowled and pulled Widowmaker’s hand away from her face. “Your hands are cold, you know.”

“What game are you playing, Tracer?” She settled a hand on Tracer’s shoulder. Her voice gained an edge. “Showing up here on Christmas, distracting me from my husband…” The hand slid from her shoulder to her neck. Tracer glared down at it. “Telling me you want a truce. Telling me to listen to my conscience.” She wanted to snap her neck in half, but resisted the temptation. “What were you thinking?”

Tracer turn away. She was silent.

“Or was it simply that you weren’t thinking at all? Hm?” She turned Tracer’s head so she was facing her. “Are you just a glutton for punishment? Do you need a reminder of who I am?”

“You’re Amélie Lacroix,” she said, steeling her voice, “and that man,” she pointed to Gérard’s headstone, “was your husband, who from what I understand loved you dearly.”

Widowmaker thumbed the edge of Tracer’s jaw. The bone was a good shape; she liked the feel of it under her fingers. “We’re on a first-name basis now, are we? Shall I call you Lena?”

“You got a problem,” Tracer said, looking her in the eyes, “you may as well say it to my face.”

Widowmaker slammed a knee into the soft flesh of her stomach. Tracer choked and reeled forward; she kicked her in the ribs, flooring her. Tracer’s back hit the ground. She set her hands on the ground as if to push herself up, but Widowmaker forced her back down with her boot, digging her heel into her gut.

“Go,” she said. “You won’t blink? You still think there’s some sliver of goodness hidden inside of me?” She pressed down harder. Tracer writhed underneath her; it was _marvelous_. “That I’m some poor, miserable, wretched,” she punctuated each word with another hard stamp, “woman waiting to be rescued from her cage? You think I need a savior?”

Tracer screwed her eyes shut and said nothing.

She eased the pressure on her stomach. “Or are you just a masochist, the sort of person who dreams about being stepped on by a pretty woman at night? Mm? Are you enjoying this?”

Tracer coughed. She might have muttered something that sounded vaguely like English.

Widowmaker brought her foot down again. She crumpled into a ball. “Louder.”

“I said,” her chest rose and fell in labored breaths, “if being a masochist is what it takes, then maybe I’ll have to look into that.”

Her eyes widened. “Quoi?”

“I know you. You act like you’re all threatening and going to kill me, but you’ve never quite managed it.” Tracer glared up at her, but the expression was watery. She was quite clearly still in pain.

“Not for lack of trying.” She slipped her hands back into her pockets and shifted her weight onto Tracer’s stomach.

“Then why not step on my throat and get on with it?”

“Would you like me to do that?”

She grinned. “Not particularly.”

“Then don’t ask.”

Tracer propped herself up on her knees and elbows, but she made no effort to push herself upright. “You ain’t soft by any means, but I notice you hesitate sometimes. Gives me hope that maybe someday we’ll see eye-to-eye.”

“Oh,” said Widowmaker, grinning, “but I much prefer looking down on you.”

Tracer laughed, and then winced. Her hands drifted down to her stomach. “To be honest, I’m just buyin’ time until my accelerator fixes itself. Meant everything I said, but I doubt you’d hear me out now. Maybe once we meet a few months down the line you’ll remember I said all this, but, well… Nice thing about time travel is that you’re always navigating uncharted territory.”

Widowmaker removed her foot from Tracer’s stomach. “Get up,” she ordered.

“Now why would I listen—”

She kicked Tracer’s collarbone, and Tracer toppled back down. “Wrong answer.”

“Fuck,” she coughed.

“Don’t be difficult. Now do as I say.” She slid her foot off, making sure to dig her heel into the joint of Tracer’s shoulder before doing so. Tracer grimaced.

“All right, all right.” She stood up and brushed herself off. “So…”

She jerked her chin at Tracer’s accelerator. “When is that thing going to repair itself? I’m sick of looking at your face.”

“I dunno.” She looked down at her chest. “Give it maybe ten, fifteen more minutes, somewhere in that vicinity.”

“Shame. Can you make it work any faster?”

She smiled wryly. “It’s sort of what controls time, love.” Her hands ran gingerly along her abdomen. “Why’d you let me go all of a sudden?”

“Too messy.” Widowmaker turned away. “Strangulation is not a method that I prefer to use, and it’s Christmas and we’re fighting over the grave of my dead husband. I didn’t want to do it.” She paused. “Why didn’t you escape?”

“Dangerous to overwork my accelerator whilst it’s still trying to fix itself. Might not be able to come back if it breaks, and you didn’t have the gun, so… Figured it was best I wait it out. Luckily my little gambit worked.” Tracer looked back at Gérard’s grave. “Sorry. I mean…”

She began to walk away, toward the entrance of the graveyard. “Go.”

“H-hey.” Tracer ran after her. “Lacroix. Amélie.”

She spun around and glared at her. “Do not call me by that name.”

“I didn’t…” She held a hand out in defense. “All I meant to say was, I understand how it feels, to be hurting.”

“You understand _nothing_ ,” she choked.

“I do,” Tracer said, with an odd sort of confidence. “In fact, I’ve met more’n one version of you, so I think I should know. Doing the whole time travel thing, getting dissociated, I’ve been to universes where you don’t even know me.” She chuckled. “Those are the worst. Think I’d rather be despised by you than totally forgotten.”

She clucked her tongue. “Tiens, tiens. I envy those Widowmakers.”

“But that’s the funny thing, you know? No matter how different they are, somehow, I know it’s always you. Not just your face. Like…” She tapped her chin. “You never really like me. A version of you that never got kidnapped—don’t think about it too hard, never turns out well—thought I was annoying. And you’re always a fantastic shot. Wicked eye. Personality’s still the same. Some things really never change. And…” Tracer paused. “You’ve always got this quiet, intense look about you. That’s when I think,” she pointed to thin air, “‘That right there, that’s the one I know.’ Makes me feel as though I never left home.” She smiled.

Something twisted in her chest. She clenched her teeth.

“Sorry for being a nuisance. Just that…” She scratched her cheek. “Wouldn’t have gotten a chance to talk to you like this, otherwise. Call it naive, or what have you—I mean, why’d I have to pick you, why not go bother someone else—and I get shot at and stepped on for my trouble… But lookin’ at you, starin’ the way you did at his grave… That’s not the expression a cold-hearted killer would make.”

Amélie looked at his grave. “Perhaps,” she breathed.

Tracer approached Gérard’s headstone. She hunched down. “They might be driving you absolutely mad, but it’s those doubts, the fears, the things that haunt you at night, that make you human. The pain and regret… The more you try to distance yourself from them, the less of a person you become. And I can’t say—because I don’t know—that there’s a solution to how you’re feeling, to what you’re going through.” She sat down on the snow. “And I don’t know if I can do anything to help.” She started to draw patterns in the snow with her finger. “But in all these universes, it seems I just keep crossing paths with you no matter what. Startin’ to wonder if maybe it’s fate—especially now that we’ve somehow managed to meet on Christmas, of all days.”

Amélie approached her wordlessly.

Tracer sprang to her feet and spun around, but her expression faltered when she saw her face.

“Why?”

Why what? Why anything?

Tracer shrugged and smiled sadly. “I don’t know, love.”

Her shoulders shook. “It’s Christmas,” she said. “It doesn’t mean anything to me anymore.” She balled her hands into fists in her pockets, and then slipped out one hand to cover her face. “Mon Dieu. C’est pathétique.”

She leaned in. “Are you… crying?”

She sniffled. Truly pathetic. Her entire body trembled in the cold. “I don’t understand why I come here anymore, to speak to a dead man about all the crimes I’ve committed. All the shit that I’ve done. It’s hardly as if I could ask for his forgiveness now.”

“Hey,” said Tracer.

“You wouldn’t understand,” she said. “There’s nothing you can do for me now.”

“W-what?”

It took her a moment to realize she had lapsed into French. She turned. “There is nothing about me you would be even remotely interested in. I am mentally disturbed, frequently abused by my captors, and as of yet entirely unprepared to attempt an escape. Whatever you feel for me, it is not cute; it is utterly insulting.” She bared her teeth in an attempt at a grin. “But I appreciate the sentiment. You are trés admirable, but you’re a complete idiot. Your girlfriend must be very proud of you.”

Her accelerator let out a loud, high-pitched whine.

“Oh.” Tracer looked down. “Time’s up, I guess.” The air around her shifted in some weird, tangible way.

“You are leaving?” said Amélie. “Finally.”

She seemed reluctant. “I might not remember this conversation, the next time we meet.”

The air grew heavy around them, like a weight. “Perhaps that is for the best.”

“But ask me about this next time we see each other anyway, yeah? I like this you best out of all the ones I’ve met.”

Amélie smiled. “Mm. I’ll take that as a compliment.”

Tracer babbled on. “It might not be exactly the same me, the one who remembers all this, and maybe she’ll remember somethin’ you don’t, just the way it goes, but I like you,” she said again. The phrase grated on her ears. “I’ll remember this, at least, that somethin’ nice happened to me on Christmas. And maybe you could make an effort to be nicer to me, too. Maybe you can even be saved this time.” There was something striking about her expression, then, something profound and terrible.

The air expanded around Tracer and made as if to swallow her up. Her accelerator glowed bright blue, and then the light enveloped her.

She grinned and waved as her body began to fade. “Merry Christmas, Amélie.” She cupped hands over her mouth. “Hope you get coal in your holiday stocking!”

Tracer vanished.

Amélie looked around in awe. Something about her surroundings seemed off—and she felt a weight in her coat that hadn’t been there before. She slipped a hand into her inside coat pocket and pulled out her gun. Then she checked the far side of the graveyard, where the snow had been shoveled, expecting to see another gun on the mound there. She saw nothing. She checked the chamber. Full magazine. “Merde.” She looked down. There was no sign of their struggle in the snow or on the ground; it was as if Tracer had never been here at all.

Good riddance.

Amélie turned and looked at Gérard’s headstone. Then she smiled and hunched down, brushing the snow off the top. It fell to the ground in a fine powder.

“Joyeux Noël, Gérard.”


	2. Afterword

The description of Tracer's time traveling abilities here is based very loosely on the MWI, or many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics. Google's first result is [this Stanford article](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qm-manyworlds/), which should give you a basic idea. Basically, when Tracer time travels, she is traveling to a different universe of her choosing with a past that matches exactly everything she's experienced up to that point. When her accelerator malfunctions, she has no control over which universe she ends up in. Thus, she ends up in universes with pasts that don't match what she remembers.

Tracer's return back to the universe she intended to travel to "erasing" all physical evidence of her being there happens mainly to avoid violating laws of causality. I don't know enough about philosophy or quantum mechanics to know what the alternative would be, but logically it seemed like the best way for her to go out. Otherwise you could assume that Tracer could kill other versions of herself, which creates, well, paradoxes.

Even though thoughts and memories are tied to a physical organ, the brain, the logic of the story obviously required that Widowmaker remember all of this in spite of Tracer leaving no physical evidence of herself behind. You can assume that many people have memories of Tracer where they shouldn't as a result, and Tracer references that idea at the end—that Widowmaker's version of Tracer won't have memories of their meeting if her lived experience isn't consistent with that of the version Widowmaker spoke with, but that she would still like to know about the conversation because she's aware that this happens.

Additionally, you could spend the whole day arguing about who Tracer (or indeed any single person) is when she travels through time—is she a single consciousness that inhabits many separate physical forms at many different points in time, or some other concept of self, for instance. In the spirit of Christmas, we can assume that it was fate that drew Tracer and Widowmaker on that particular day, and that how they got to be there down to the individual particle doesn't matter as much as what actually happened.

Anyways, don't think about it too hard. Happy holidays, and if you do indeed celebrate it, have a merry Christmas. :)


End file.
